


Autumn Blue

by theepitomeofamess



Category: Original - Fandom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-05
Updated: 2019-02-05
Packaged: 2019-10-23 00:31:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17672987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theepitomeofamess/pseuds/theepitomeofamess
Summary: This is a work I wrote for a friend of mine upon request for a sca thing that she and her friends are doing. The guidelines she gave were fantasy, dramatic, and relatively short (i might've had trouble with that last one), and this is influenced heavily by short stories I have been reading in a creative writing class. This is the end result. The title may change. Feedback/criticism is more than welcome. Enjoy.





	Autumn Blue

The air has chilled around him significantly since he started the day, signalling the slow beginning of night. Crickets begin to sing and howls announce the arrival of the wolf’s time. He knows many who would slow against the cold, who would insist on setting camp for the night before the sun has even started to set. Many of his comrades in arms would already be settled down at a fire by now, roasting a squirrel on a spit. Not him. He keeps riding, following the fading light even after it’s dipped beneath the horizon. He’s better than that.  
Thalia whinnies as the sun rises. She isn’t overworked yet because of the steady pace he’s been keeping, but she needs water. She can hear a stream nearby. He can hear it, too. They stop for two minutes so Thalia can drink and he can fill his water skin. They don’t have time for anything else. He hears the whispers in the stream, the snickers and the stories, and he knows that he needs to keep moving. Mounting Thalia again, he gets back to the trail as quickly as possible and keeps going, following the line of his shadow.  
The trees talk with the stream, the breeze laughing at their comments. He can’t understand a single word - he hardly hears them - but he knows that they are talking about him. They know what he is doing. They know what’s happened to every other person that has been foolish enough to believe the rumors.  
They know that the rumors are true - far too true for anyone willing to prove them right.  
The colors around him are saturated to the point of painful to look at for too long, scarlet and tiger orange leaves burning furiously against an impossibly blue sky. He has to bow his head, watching the trail just above Thalia’s ears to keep himself from getting nauseous at the sight. He doesn’t see when the trees open their eyes, watching as he rides by a bit more quickly than he was before. He doesn’t see the vultures grinning at their future meal between the blazing canopy and eerily cloudless sky.  
He only truly stops riding on the third night, when he can hardly stand the exhaustion any more. Thalia felt the same, lying on the ground almost as soon as she was content with how much she’d eaten. He known that he’s been working her too hard, only giving her short bursts of rest while he stopped to gather more water or food, but he can’t afford to lose time on this. He refuses to end up like William, declared dead after being missing for a month after he should have been back. He refuses to become just one more soldier lost to the woods. He’s smarter than that, better than that.  
He refuses to take his armor off, just in case.  
Leaning back against Thalia’s side, he looks to the sky. He can only just make out stars beyond the canopy that has faded from fire to ink. It still unnerves him to look at the space around him - he’ll imagine a face in the canopy if he looks for too long, or hear a word of doom prophesied in birdsong. It makes his head spin.  
No, it’s just the exhaustion. He knows that it’s just exhaustion that’s making him hallucinate, that’s making him dizzy. Pressing himself closer into Thalia, he clings to the handle of his sword and tries his best to get sleep. It’s hard, though, when all he can hear is the not so distant chatter of what he imagines to be wolves praising the thought of his liver soon becoming their chew toy.  
“Getting close,” he mutters to Thalia, petting her head as he feels the wind pick up. They’re coming up on the center of the wood, the center of the myths. He knows that it’s almost unheard of for journeys through woods like this to go untampered with, but he knows why he hasn’t come across any foe - any living thing at all - since the beginning of his journey. He knows that they want to see the fight, that they want to see him lose. The only concern in his mind is how he’s going to get out of the woods once he’s won, since they will probably all come after him once they see that their champion is no match for him.  
He’s nervous when he sees the clearing, of course. Who wouldn’t be? He’s been hearing stories about this place since he was a child, stories meant to keep him from entering the woods in the first place. His mother had sobbed so much when he’d told her about his quest. He knows that she thinks he’s being foolish. He probably is. But the line between foolish and brave is finer and more fragile than a glass hair. He can’t afford to try and make a definite distinction between the two, especially not now that he’s here. He can’t afford to be like that. He has to be better.  
He hitches Thalia to a tree - he doesn’t want her to be in the line of fire, but he doesn’t want her to run away once he wins and needs her to take him home. Petting her between the eyes, he almost can’t bring himself to say goodbye. That might be what happens beyond the treeline - he might never see her again.  
He can’t afford to think that way. He has to be better than that.  
“I’ll be back soon,” he assures her, the words scorching his throat. “I’ll be back soon.”  
Knuckles white as he grips his sword, he does his best to take in the clearing. The color saturation is worse here than anywhere else. The grass and small garden to the left of the cabin are just about glowing, the windows looking into the cabin iridescent. He hears expectant chatter echoing from the treeline. The creatures - spirits, nymphs, fae, he’s heard them called a million things - are gathering to see the show, to watch and see if they get a particularly bloody bit of entertainment to hold them over until the next righteous moron comes along.  
His mind swarms with the different stories he’s been told about the witch throughout his life. His father had called her a creature of hellfire and scorches her victims entirely with a single look. His mother had called her a wolf that had assumed human form and shares her victims as a meal with her pack. The village priest warned that she was possessed by the ultimate evil and would send her victims to serve their dark master, leaving only a few corpses at the edge of her woods as an example. His grandmother had called her a wonderful judge of character.  
He never knew what she meant by that, but it didn’t matter among the pile of men the witch has stolen away.  
He’s sure that she would have every entrance to the place lined with traps. After all, she’d been attacked countless times over the past century or so. Of course, the front door might be spared. Nobody uses the front door when they’re planning an attack. It’s only when he’s got his back pressed to the front facade of the cabin that he realizes he might have wanted to come up with a plan.  
Something moves in the cabin. The tap of a cup on a wooden tabletop and the whistle of a teapot.  
The whistle is broken by the crack of the wooden door against his foot.

He can’t remember a time when he hasn’t worked with horses. His father owned a horse farm, his first job away from home was in the king’s stables. He was there when Thalia was born, and he has never wanted a life away from stables, away from the smell of hay and mud and horse shit. Most people he met couldn’t see the beauty in it, they scrunched their noses at the life that always left him covered in dirt and sweat that nearly crystallized if he didn’t wash it off immediately.  
He’s brushing Thalia gently. He’s in stables that are familiar but foreign. Craning his neck slightly, he looks to the worn down ceiling of the stables. Between the cracks, he can see the color of the sky - so blue, so bright, always cloudless. He can’t remember a time the sky hasn’t been clear. The color seems to squeeze his head between his eyes, the color so flawless that it can’t be real.  
He makes a mental note to fix that ceiling before they get a storm rolling in.  
He doesn’t ask when they last had rain. He doesn’t question what he knows. He’s better than that.  
Through the window behind Thalia, he can see William working in the fields. He’s always had a green thumb. Their parents used to be friends, trading horse manure for produce and buying each other drinks. He’d gone to school with William, played with him while they weren’t working or in class. He’s the one who had taught William to ride a horse, the practice leading to William’s stories about how he would be the famous hero who brought the witch’s head back to the village on a pike. Something about the proclamation had always sounded fake, halfhearted as he looked to his father who warned him to stand by his promise of heroism.  
It was William who had persuaded him to join the royal guard in a world somewhere between a dream and a memory, another life entirely.  
“Glad to see you’re settling in all right.”  
The voice is so clear that it startles him, the brush landing in a cloud of dust on the ground. The woman standing in the doorway of the stable looks old enough to be his mother, silver hair and laughter lines the only indication of any aging. She wears a cloak the came green as the trees lining the perimeter of their little community and a smile that radiates the kind of maternal compassion that’s laced with white lies. In spite of her welcoming presence, he can’t bring himself to look her in the eyes. They’re blue - autumn blue - so clear and bright that it hurts his head.  
“Can I help you?” He picks up the brush to avoid looking at her. He wants nothing more than to make her leave, but he won’t. He’s better than that.  
“ I just came to see how you’re getting on. It can be disorienting for some, and it doesn’t always go through the first time.”  
What the hell are you talking about?  
“Would you like to sit down?” He grabs a chair from the corner, setting it out for her. It’s all too easy for him to bite away the question that he actually wanted to ask.  
“I see you retained your training in chivalry. Most of them didn’t learn it in the first place.” She moves to sit where he set the chair, and he turns back to Thalia.  
The closer she gets, the harder he finds it to focus on Thalia’s mane. The brush isn’t moving, just sitting between his palm and the side of her neck. He can almost feel a crisp breeze coming off of her, running its fingers through his hair. Though she seems vaguely familiar, he has no idea who this woman is or why she’s watching him so intently. If he didn’t know any better, he’d think that he was reliving the first time he prepared a chicken for cooking, his mother watching his every move over his shoulder.  
“You’re a friend of William’s, right?” He nods, still with his back to her. He hears the chair just barely creak under her weight. The brush manages to move through the hair again, his body running on autopilot. “He’s a good kid. Just barely edged out of death, he did. He buried it so deep that I almost couldn’t figure out what he was trying to prove.”  
“I’m sorry,” he finally forced himself to face her, “but what are you talking about?”  
“Oh,” she nodded after a moment, realization crossing her features. “It really hit you hard, then. Don’t worry about it. It doesn’t matter.” She stood, making a stride to leave before looking back at him. Reaching out, she places a hand on his shoulder. “You’re good, you know. I’ve known that for a while. You’re good, better than most. You don’t need to prove it. Not anymore, at least. Just take good care of Thalia. That’s all you need to worry about now.”  
Something about the curve of her smile, the crows feet at the corners of her eyes, the slight crack in the cadence of her voice. It all seems more familiar the more he looks at her. She’s still otherworldly, but there’s something that he knows. Something that he trusts.  
He nods, and she leaves him to tend to Thalia. There’s something about her, a feeling that he can’t shake. She knows him better than anyone ever has, she knows things that he’s never told anyone before, at least to his recollection.  
“Maybe she’s psychic,” he mutters to Thalia, who whinnies and shakes her mane in response as he brushes his way down her side. “Or maybe she’s just a really good judge of character.”


End file.
